A LOCAL law that helped protect Guildford’s prize farmland from housing development has been abolished by Westminster.

The Government Office of the South East (GOSE), which represents central government in the region, rejected Guild-ford Borough Council’s (GBC) pleas to keep the guideline.

Civil servants said that the farmland is adequately protected by more up-to-date national policy, a claim firmly rejected in some quarters.

Westminster has forced boroughs such as Guildford to abolish their local plans, blueprint for the area, and replace them with a similar sounding development framework.

District authorities could apply to GOSE to keep some parts of its local plan.

However, GOSE said the farmland protection law used by GBC was out of date, and national policy should offer the same assurances. The law, called Protection of the Best and Most Versatile Land, classified agricultural land into grades one to five, depending on its ability to produce crops.

The best and most versatile of this land is defined in the three highest grades, one, two, and 3a.

There are 10,043 hectares of agricultural land in Guildford borough, of which about 1% falls within the top two grades, while some 42% is grade three.

The borough’s now obsolete planning rule said the best agricultural land in the area would be protected from development unless there is a huge need for homes, a lack of available sites, and the land is the lowest grade.

Planning applications are ticked off against policies in the local plan.

Tracey Haskins, planning policy manager at GBC, said the authority was disappointed it could not hold onto the rule, but hoped national guidelines would maintain farmland protection.

“What the government has said to us is that farmland still has protection – all that has happened is the local expression of that has been removed for a temporary period.

“Because of the planning process underway at the regional level, there is understandably local concern about what it will mean, and will there be development.

“It is nicer for us to have this local policy because it gives us one more tool in the box.

“If we have concerns about losing top grade operational land and that is why we asked for it to be saved.

“That is why we are disappointed it has not been saved. We do lose something local but we can put that back.”

A spokesman for GOSE confirmed the policy was dropped because national laws are just as robust as more local ones.

However, this has been rejected by critics who worry that the borough’s countryside is already under attack after a report recommended green belt be opened up to housing development. They said that national farmland policy offers much less protection than local laws, adding that it gives a presumption to- wards development and not protection.

It is also thought that new national guidelines, created in 2004, are weaker than they were previously. Tim Harrold, chairman of the Surrey branch of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, said that he is very concerned.

“Anything that weakens the protection of the farmland is dangerous, and Guildford borough has always been very careful about these things,” he said.

“In a national context, Guildford might not seem so large.

“A key feature is the presence of working farms close to the town centre. Farming is how the landscape is maintained.

“We need to start working from the grass roots up, rather than receiving remote messages coming down from on high.”